Put a Dent in it: FIGHTING FOR THE MIDDLE
Representing Pennsylvania’s 15th District, Allentown native Charlie Dent has always fought for the middle ground in times of extremism. He talks truth to power. He’s doing it right now, in the Age of Trump. I wish I had Dent’s balls.
Imagine the scene: He’s there in the White House with some fellow Republican members of Congress, waiting, when in walks the President of the United States, a man who has devoted so much energy to making himself appear larger than life — dominant, fully in charge, not to be opposed. And now Trump gets to sit at that grand Oval Office desk, made of timbers from the HMS Resolute, and sign any executive order he wants, command the U.S. military, and affect millions of lives with a word.
The White House is famed as the greatest home-court advantage in the world. Its symbolic power can overwhelm some people. But it’s always a mistake to count on that image. It depends on the audience. During my time as a White House correspondent, I saw that magic fizzle sometimes. Even for Ronald Reagan, who until now was the most skilled performer to hold down the biggest role in the world.
On this mid-March day, the current office-holder didn’t at all look like someone who held an advantage over visitors. Instead, President Donald J. Trump looked seriously uncomfortable and pissed. And when his eyes fell on Dent, he looked truly pissed.
The real-estate magnate turned leader of the free world was frustrated. He assumed that members of Congress in his own party would line up to give him the huge win he had promised on the campaign trail. “I will repeal and replace Obamacare!” he’d bellowed over and over as he crisscrossed the nation.
Not so fast. The day before this convocation at the White House, Congressman Charlie Dent had told reporters that he would not be supporting Trumpcare.
As he sat across from the 57-year-old father of three, President Trump was realizing he might be denied the politically orgasmic moment of a big early victory and the momentum it could bring him for the rest of his legislative agenda. He looked away from Representative Dent, pitched party unity to the group, and essentially waited for applause but got none. According to a report from CNN, Trump then asked the representatives to tell him, one by one, if they were supporting his bill. When he got to Dent, the centrist Republican said no. Not the answer Trump wanted. “Why am I even talking to you?” he rumbled. The words spilled out of his mouth like acid reflux.
Dent knew damn well why he’d been invited to the White House. Trump desperately needed him and the rest of a group of 54 moderate Republicans he cochairs to vote in favor of Trumpcare. Dent’s coalition of like-minded Republicans is called the Tuesday Group. Its members make up 20 percent of the Republicans in the House of Representatives.
Dent knew Trump had brought him and selected Tuesday Group moderates into his office in hopes of charming or intimidating them into changing their positions from “no” to “yes.” The president may have thought he was in surefire deal-maker mode that day, but his performance fell flat. And he’s not used to that kind of failure. On the contrary, he’s used to “knockin’ ’em dead,” as his show-business colleagues like to say.
Trump remains intoxicated by how well his act played on the campaign trail. He continues to imagine that his aggression and big talk will get results, and when that doesn’t happen, it freaks him out. If Ivanka and her husband Jared Kushner are not there to calm him down, anything can come out of his mouth or get typed in a tweet.
Trumpcare critics called it a heartless piece of legislative stink that would have stuffed cash into the pockets of Trump’s rich pals while dropping 24 million Americans from health insurance. These millions would have included many voters who’d sent Charlie Dent to Congress to watch their backs. Before he sat in that room with Trump, the congressman had issued some blunt words expressing his opposition to the bill — words that made it clear the president was not going to have an easy time bringing Dent around.
“I cannot support the bill and will oppose it,” he stated plainly. “I believe this bill, in its current form, will lead to the loss of coverage and make insurance unaffordable for too many Americans, particularly for low-to-moderate income and older individuals.” Such an assessment perfectly squared with the findings of our leading authority on these matters, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.
“We have,” Dent continued, “an important opportunity to enact reforms that will result in real health care transformation — bringing down costs and improving health outcomes. This legislation,” he added of Trumpcare, “misses the mark.”
When Dent reaffirmed his decision to vote against it, Trump hardened. He looked at the congressman and reportedly blared, “You are destroying the Republican Party!”
Trump then said Dent’s opposition to Trumpcare would also kill his chances of winning passage of the lopsided anti-middle-class tax bill that Trump calls a “tax reform” package. And he let the congressman know he’d blame him, personally, if the tax bill failed.
Dent listened respectfully to President Trump, who appeared flummoxed that he wasn’t getting his way. It’s not that Dent set out to demonstrate to the president that there were limits to his persuasive powers when it came to legislators, no matter the party. It’s that Dent was committed to doing what he could to stop the president from pushing a bill that he believed would harm constituents of Pennsylvania’s 15th Congressional District — the children, women, and men Dent was elected to serve.
“This legislation,” Dent said of Trumpcare, “misses the mark.”
President Trump craved major legislative accomplishments in his first hundred days.
On the campaign trail, he repeatedly spoke of how much he’d get done right out of the gate. To keep his promises, he needed not only to pass an Obamacare replacement and start “reforming” the tax code, but he also needed immediate action on that “great wall” between the U.S. and Mexico that Mexico was going to pay for.
But President Trump was caught off-guard by the challenges of repealing and replacing Obamacare. “Nobody knew health care could be so complicated!” he famously declared. Well, nobody except Dent and anyone else in government who had ever tried to extend medical services to the poor and those with preexisting conditions.
Unlike Dent, a lifelong moderate and student of diplomacy and governance (he has a master’s degree in Public Administration), Trump seems to have no self-generated political or ideological core. He flows into whatever looks to him like a pathway to victory. Which is why it was easy for him to go from insulting NATO and China to embracing both, and from declaring for years that America should not get involved in Syria to suddenly launching 59 cruise missiles into a Syrian Air Force base.
Charlie Dent, on the other hand, works from a foundation of guiding principles that have served him and the people of the 15th District in good stead since 2004, when he was first elected to Congress. When asked about the White House confrontation, Dent said, “My bottom line is this: This discussion has been far too much about artificial timelines, arbitrary deadlines, all to affect the baseline on tax reform. This conversation should be more about the people whose lives are going to be impacted by our decisions on their health care.”
Before Dent and other Republican moderates met with Trump that day, the president had already run into trouble with the House Freedom Caucus — a collection of three-dozen or so very conservative members. They demanded that Trumpcare (officially, the American Health Care Act) drop even more benefits than its authors had proposed. Trump offered to meet them halfway to get the bill passed.
In Dent’s view, these maneuvers were disconnected from reality.
“A lot of the concessions that the White House is making at the end of this process were to try to appease…the hard right on essential health benefits and other issues,” the congressman reflected, “all to placate people who are not going to vote for the bill anyway. And by doing that, they ended up alienating more people on the center right, or moderates. That was really what happened.”
Dent believes there is simply no way to successfully and durably reform health care without cooperation from the other party. In addressing this specifically, he looked back to what the Obama-led Democrats did in 2010 when they passed their bill with minimal Republican support: “We as Republicans should not make the same mistakes that the Democrats did in 2010 by muscling that law through. I voted against it. We, the Republicans, are attempting to make the same mistake.”
Trump and his allies are quite capable of doing serious, even career-ending, electoral damage to any Republican who displeases him. And Congressman Dent has displeased Trump over and over again.
It started with the primary campaign. Initially, Dent believed Trump would never get near the nomination. Then, as millions of working-class whites and a gaggle of billionaires rallied around his fear-based messaging about Muslims, the border, China, and more, along with his promises of returning jobs to the Rust Belt, repealing Obamacare, and lowering taxes, Dent felt compelled to step up as moderate Republicans before him had when demagogues tried to play one group of Americans against others.
Dent said Trump’s rhetoric, which he labeled “incendiary,” made it impossible for him to remain silent. He would not vote for the Republican nominee, he said, and suggested that others in his party should write in someone else as well.
Fast-forward to Trump’s first days in office, and the following three words from Charlie Dent: “This is ridiculous!” That was his reaction to the first White House attempt at banning Muslims from entering the U.S. under the guise of preventing terrorism.
“I guess I understand what [Trump’s] intention is, but unfortunately [his] executive order appears to have been rushed through without full consideration,” Dent continued. “You know, there are many, many nuances of immigration policy that can be life-or-death for many innocent, vulnerable people around the world.”
It needs to be said that Charlie Dent is no wuss on terrorism. Almost seven years earlier, in 2010, he introduced a House Resolution calling on the U.S. State Department to issue a Certificate of Loss of Nationality to the only American leader of Al Qaeda, Anwar al-Awlaki, probably the group’s most effective English-language recruiter, and a player in bin Laden’s organization before the 9/11 attacks. Dent emphasized that al-Awlaki had essentially renounced his citizenship by his many treasonous acts. Less than a year later, President Obama assassinated al-Awlaki with a drone strike in Yemen.
Dent’s Allentown constituents include Syrian-Americans. They are patriotic U.S. citizens grateful to be part of the American tapestry — that collection of the world’s races, colors, cultures, and religions that keeps reenergizing our country. Many people are surprised when they learn that Steve Jobs, founder of Apple, was the son of a Syrian immigrant father. Immigrants bring to America a powerful desire to succeed and that benefits everyone.
For Syrian-Americans in Dent’s district, watching the horrors of the civil war in their homeland unfold on TV has been almost too much to bear. Some of them had been working for years to get their relatives out of that living hell. Finally — just as Trump was taking office — a number of these Syrian hopefuls who’d been fully vetted by the State Department were on their way to safety and freedom in the U.S. Celebrations were planned. Houses were purchased for the new arrivals. Their relations were excited to welcome their kin to better lives in America.
Then, President Trump was inaugurated, moved into the White House, and before long, he issued his first Muslin ban executive order. It included an immediate freeze on Syrians entering the United States. Whether he knew it or not, Trump was shattering the lives of innocent human beings, including some of Dent’s people.
Before Trump announced his ban, Syrian families were making their way out of a land of great beauty and historical richness turned slaughterhouse by Assad and his Russian and Iranian allies, and by ISIS in the territories they controlled. Some of these families were actually aboard planes bound for new lives as Trump was rolling out his order. Two of those families were traveling together on a flight to Philadelphia. As they’d boarded their plane in the Middle East, their hearts filled with joy, hope, and no small amount of relief. They had no idea what was about to happen to them.
When these families landed at Philadelphia International Airport, agents of the U.S. government — Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers — stopped them cold when they presented their passports and told them they could not enter the country because the President of the United States had so ordered.
“I do not support Muslim bans,” said Dent. “I do not support Muslim registries.”
The ICE agents were confused because of the sloppy way the executive order had come down to them. They had never seen anything like it. The refugees — after their long journey and arrival in America — were in tears as they were ordered to wait until they could be loaded onto the next plane headed back to the Middle East.
These Syrian families were in a state of shock. They had been through the rigorous State Department vetting process for almost fourteen years. They had their visas. They weren’t even Muslims; they were Christians. Trump’s executive order contained language making it easier for Christians to enter. But these families were Syrians and Trump’s order specifically barred anyone from Syria — Christian or Muslim, it didn’t matter. The two families who’d reached Pennsylvania could not comprehend that their lives had just been upended again by forces out of their control.
Their dreams of a better life in America had sustained them through frustration, fear, danger, pain, anger, and despair. And now they’d been blindsided by a fear-and-politics-driven betrayal of the promise of an America symbolized by the copper statue in New York Harbor.
On the other side of the airport’s immigration reception hall, their American relatives could not believe what was going on. A stunned Sarah Assali told a reporter from radio station WHYY: “We brought them here for a better future. But we’re also…taking them away from, you know, a war zone where they don’t have food, and they don’t have water. And you don’t even know when you’re going to have electricity next.”
The Assalis didn’t need to reach out to their congressman. They were already connected to him.
“My son and I visited their home last night,” Congressman Dent said the next day on National Public Radio. “Well, here’s what happened. Their family members had arrived from Syria via Beirut via Oman-Amman, Jordan via Doha, Qatar, and then into Philadelphia. They arrived in Philly at about 7:45 A.M. I became aware of the situation around ten o’clock from my son, who happened to know the family well. He went to high school with one of them. He — my son — contacted me. And I got a hold of the family. And bottom line is, we tried to find out the status of the family.”
But Dent could do nothing.
Trump’s order cast the six innocent, fully vetted Syrians as threats to America by dint of their nationality. ICE agents had no choice. Three hours after the two Syrian families deplaned from a long, exhausting flight from the Middle East, they were escorted onto another plane by federal officers who were doing their best to follow the strangest order they had ever received. The six Syrians flew back to Qatar. It was only hours later that a federal judge reviewed the ban and shut it down.
The whole situation struck Congressman Dent as not only inhumane but an example of poor governance. “They have their paperwork in order for a green card,” he stated. “They were to be greeted and then taken up here to Allentown where the family purchased a home for them and furnished it and, you know, was waiting for them. This family has been in process since about 2003…long before the Syrian civil war.
“This executive order was not properly processed,” continued Dent. “You know, the departments of Defense, State, Homeland Security, and Justice I don’t believe were consulted in a meaningful way. I urged the administration to halt enforcement of the order until a more thoughtful and deliberate policy could be instated…. What has me somewhat bewildered [is] why, you know, this has gone into effect the way it did. Because the family that I’m dealing with is a Christian family…. [They] were in flight when this order was announced and apparently then enforced. It just struck me as very unfair.”
During the presidential campaign, Dent flat-out opposed Trump’s racial and religious fearmongering. It was one of the reasons he publicly declared he could not vote for him after he became the nominee. And he was equally blunt about a policy singling out one religion. “I do not support Muslim bans,” said Dent. “I do not support Muslim registries.” And when it came to the two Syrian families swept up in the hastily implemented ban, Dent observed: “They were immigrants…that had gone through the proper channels. Everything was done legally, lawfully; they spent thousands of dollars. People who are in that situation are being prevented from coming in.”
The Muslim travel ban was part of Trump’s campaign appeal, crafted by none other than Steve Bannon, former ideological leader of the current GOP zombie apocalypse who helped bring about Trump’s victory. Bannon is the polar opposite of Dent.
“Deconstructing the administrative state” is Bannon’s stated top priority. That roughly translates into destroying all the agencies of government that help and protect people from the predations of the soulless and powerful — like the Environmental Protection Agency preventing polluters from poisoning poor communities downstream from mines and factories.
Instead of destroying those agencies, Congressman Dent wants them to work more effectively and efficiently. Instead of working to deny people their civil rights, as Bannon and his co-conspirator Attorney General Jeff Sessions plan to do, Dent is a champion of expanding rights — especially for the LGBTQ community.
Dent has repeatedly called upon his party — the GOP — to engage in the nitty-gritty of governance, which requires stepping back from hard-edged ideologies to create a cooperative space in which the business of the people gets done. He’s even gone so far as to declare it’s time to “marginalize” House Republicans who “don’t want to govern” but prefer to rage on under the banner of their own right-wing version of moral/political purity. As Dent plainly put it, “We have to get our act together.”
When the ill-conceived Trumpcare went down in flames stoked by Dent and others, right-wing commentators saw a much bigger defeat. As Liz Peek wrote on the Fox News website: “It is the young Trump presidency…that takes the biggest hit here. Trump was elected because people across the political spectrum thought he could fix some of our problems. He was the businessman who could import common sense to Washington, and the deal-maker who could bring people together. He made big promises; a country tired of stalemate and disappointment believed that he could bring back jobs, reduce our debt, build the wall, find a better health care solution. His credibility and credentials now lie in tatters. All that optimism that has stoked the stock market and boosted investment plans — all that may fade.”
Then came a second version of Trumpcare and the president twisted enough arms to squeak it past the House. Trump took a victory lap as though he had just repealed and replaced Obamacare, when in fact there was little reason to expect that the Senate would conspire in this travesty. But many people with preexisting conditions across the nation began to panic, putting their already fragile health in even greater and unnecessary danger.
Within minutes of the House vote and Trump’s wildly premature chest-thumping, Dent spoke truth to power again, declaring: “I am disappointed that the House passed this bill, which I believe will increase health insurance costs — particularly for low- to moderate-income Americans — increase the number of uninsured by … as many as 24 million people, and undermine important protections for those living with preexisting conditions. It is my hope that cooler heads will prevail in the Senate and that they will produce a better bill that is focused on improving health care for all Americans.”
It is Dent’s basic decency, his grasp of the issues, his honesty and courageous clarity that make him and his Tuesday Group a political threat to the extremists within the party the president is supposed to lead, and to Steve Bannon’s grandiose plans to smash every good thing the federal government has created, beginning with FDR’s New Deal in 1933.
If Trump continues to fail to deliver his promised legislative agenda, Dent’s moderate Republican voice could become even more influential, and that would only be good for his party and for the nation we all love.
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